Markus Mauder on his blog posts a look at the soon to be released KDE 4.0.0 complete with screenshots and a review of some of the significant changes. "I hope you enjoy this preview and come to share my opinion that KDE 4 is going to rock!" He also has an album of screenshots on Picasa that expand on the ones in the article. The big release happens on Friday, join us in #kde4-release-party on Freenode to celebrate.

Wow, like KDE 3.1? Already? Not kde 3.0 ?? So we already have a BIG improvement here! ;-) Just joking, I agree with you about the solid base for the future, but for now: look at how the windeco nicely blends with the style's background! hear the OxySounds! enjoy the OxyIcons! and Feel the OxyFeeling!!
People I showed the KDE 4.0.0 desktop were really surprised and appealed ;-)

The article at http://jarzebski.pl/read/kde-4-rev-758000.so is a very fascinating read (and it was cool to hear the log-in and log-out sounds). For those who can't read Polish, the author was very happy with many new aspects of KDE 4.0 (such as Oxygen) but discussed a few things that could especially see more work for later KDE4 releases (I translated the major things in the list, sorry in advance if I got anything wrong):
*KDM hasn't really been touched
*More oxygen windeco configuration would be nice
*No way yet to change the size and position of the bottom panel
*No ability to change the position of applets on the bottom panel
*The grid of icons isn't very flexible yet in terms of size and spacing
*Few config options for Phonon
*Not enough options in System Settings yet.
*A lot less effects in KWin than Compiz (my note: but at least KWin is more focussed on useful effects than just plain bling, though a cube would be awesome).

As you can tell, these were pretty expected and understandable omissions, given that 4.0 is the foundation release and the developers are spread very thin. It'll be cool to gradually see all these things drop off the ToDo list as KDE4 enters later releases. Great work people!

I think that the the only "real" complaints are those about KDM (which is a pity it hasn't been touched, but I understand why) and Plasma issues (which are going to be fixed in the future). the "not enough options" on the other hand is a good thing, IMO :P

It will beat Vista because Vista will be the same in the next 4 - 5 years but this is just the beginning of KDE4. Already KDE 4.0 has quite a few features that Vista can only dream of not to mention it's speed and the small amount of resources that it needs when compared to Vista.

Not that I don't love KDE as much as the next guy, but from my experience KDE 4 is way slower than Vista, last time I checked was KDE 4.0 RC2, perhaps things changed. But you are right, this is just the beginning, most of the good stuff is yet to come.

I can confirm this. I'm on a Intel Core Duo 2.0 Ghz, 3 Gb RAM and 512MB Nvidia graphics card and the graphics are lacking.
I'm hoping this is a specific problem with my hardware, because otherwise a lot of people will be suprised. It may also be the kubuntu packages that have problems.
I tried this with post-RC2 packages.

However, I'm sure this issue will be fixed quickly or may allready have been fixed

I don't see that. I got a completely new high-end laptop last week shipped with Vista. Vista is pretty slow, but at least it realised that itself and auto decreased eye-candy. KDE 4 on other hand is completely smooth.

Perhaps there's something wrong with your setup or the machine is crippled by the shitware bundled by the vendor. My laptop is one year old and Vista runs on it like a dream. Granted, it has 2GB of RAM.

KWin is snappier and smoother on my ATi AIGLX than on my nvidia system -- So I suspect driver issues with nvidia.ko. Once KDE 4.0 is out and becomes more 'mainstream', I hope NVidia will sort those issues out. They have been responive in the past fo far ...

If you have an NVidia graphics card, try adding "export KWIN_NVIDIA_HACK=1" to your .bash_profile and .bashrc. This should make compositing smoother and faster. Without that KWin with composting enabled felt quite slow on my system (not moving windows, but switching from one window to another or from one tab to another). With this, switching windows or tabs became much quicker.

I have seen at least a couple of bug reports about poor performance on NVidia hardware. Apparently the very latest NVidia drivers remedy the problems somewhat. If you haven't already got them, please try them and see if there is any change.

When alt-tab works I'll consider playing with it some more. All I do now is update the new version from subversion and compile it up once every few days, confirm alt-tab still doesn't work.. remove .kde, reload, confirm alt-tab doesn't work again then decide it 'aint worth it.

It's likely kded4, which handles the global shortcuts like alt-tab, is not running for him. Alt-f4, ctrl-alt-del etc then would not work either. The output of "qdbus org.kde.kded" should include "/KdedGlobalAccel". If the service does not exist or doesn't include that interface, something is wrong.

Since it generally works, I would try logging in with a clean user (or $KDEHOME) as there could be some user config left over from pre 4.0 development versions within $KDEHOME that is causing the problem.

- after deletion of "old" RC2 install and fresh "1 Click install" from OpenSuse last night.
- kded4 is indeed not running at startup (please - anybody - is there a trick?)
- after kded4 is started manually from konsole command line, all services are working; however short-cut's are not
- system configuration->advanced->services correctly report that the global short-cut server is not running; but also the "start" button is grayed out
- I got it to work few times by changing some short-cuts, but not repeatable

So, after KDE4 ist finally coming in an first version, the only things that bugs me is: where can i get it? I'm using Debian Sid(ux) and officialy, there are only the Experimental-Version, which override KDE3 :-(